The Horrible Bosses of Hollywood

It sounds so glamorous, working in Hollywood. Doesn't it? Sure, if you're a studio chief or an actor with your own trailer. But if you're a powerless minion, it's a special kind of hell. Long before he was the boss of this magazine, Jim Nelson endured the worst humiliation that town can offer: life as a Hollywood assistant

The dog snarls at me from his coffin. In life, Digger was the most golden of retrievers, but now he lies sideways, stiff and sculpted, a feeble paw pointing the way to some last, unfetchable bone. His coat, once alarmingly orange, has gone rusty and wet, like the juicy copper of expired batteries. He looks exhausted, as if he had taken the walk of his life. He looks—there is no running from it—like roadkill. And that mouth! His Final Groomers have wrapped the black rubber of his lips tightly around his incisors so that, defanged by death, he might growl into eternity.

I have heard that pet cemeteries exist, have even read books in which they figure, but until I drove up to the Valley for this service, I have never imagined hanging out with an embalmed canine. Here in the Mourning Room—a sad shuffle away from the office, where caskets, tiny and cute and tragic, are sold—Digger’s box sits below a celestial track light. Around him there is satin and frills and the sagging comfort of pink insulation. But nothing can soften the truth: He is going into that hole outside, and we are all here to witness it.

The turnout is small—my boss, a group of his shrinking circle of friends, and me. I am here as a delicate function of my job, which is blurry and difficult to define. I work in Hollywood as a writer’s assistant. My two bosses, M— and L—, are TV writers; Digger was M—’s dog, and, in a sense, one of my masters. I knew when I was hired that the position required a good deal of secretarial work: answering phones, setting up meetings, formatting scripts. What I did not understand is that the job of writer’s assistant is whatever the writers deem it to be. Writers, you know, are a terrifically creative bunch; they like to sit around all day thinking of new ways to employ their assistants. This often involves dogs, or any other pets the writers might have.

Take Digger, whom I have come to know through a series of rigorous walks. Indeed I have, upon instruction and in the middle of a busy workday, driven 4.8 miles to my boss’s Hollywood Hills home to unlock the door, fetch the leash, and let Digger take his airs. I have padded around the dog parks of Los Angeles, pulled him away from strange curs, fed him biscuits and livery treats. Yes, Digger and I have had our memories. But strangely, I find, I am not torn at his passing.

And yet I grieve, publicly, for the sake of my job. M— has requested my presence in a manner I take as a command. In the first flush of grief, he asked me to show my loyalty—You’ll be there for Digger, right?—using that sort of modern benevolent boss voice that pretends, for a moment, that there are no longer lines of authority and that, at the end of the day, I want to come to his dog’s weird memorial service.

You would not call M— a people person. He is acerbic, career-drunk, moving toward midlife friendlessness. Digger was his only steadfast pal. Dogs don’t fuck you over, he once bellowed at me in a conversation I surely should have been paid $250 an hour for. When he asked if I was coming to the funeral, I took it as: Mourn with me—or else.

Hollywood bosses prize loyalty, which is why so many have dogs.

And so we are gathered together to mark the end of a frisky life. There is no priest, no eulogy. In their place: awkwardness. We move through the room aimlessly, uncertain where our mourning should take us. (I have never felt so keenly the need for a funeral director.) The man who sold M— the plot finally stumbles in from the office next door and tells us what to do: We should all file up to the casket, say our good-byes, and exit outside, so that M— can have the room to grieve alone. Sounds like a plan!

When it’s my turn, I’m a little skeeved out. Not only does Digger look more aggressive than usual, he appears to be sweating in the halogen heat—there is a cosmetic dampness about him, as if he’d been moussed to death by stylists. I walk up to the coffin and stare down—a little sad for Digger, suddenly. Poor dog. You should have been cremated or buried in the woods, far from the tender, neurotic mercies of TV writers. What the hell are you doing here?

The question hangs in the air, comes back at me, as if dear old Digger were telling me, Ask yourself, loser.

For some reason, I make the sign of the cross, then shuffle out into the warm L.A. sun, looking for answers.

Columbia Pictures TV Studios, corner of Sunset and Gower, 1989. Every morning I report to the grim desk slammed into the corner of the reception room. My bosses, the comedy writers, have their own office, a stately pleasure dome, across the hall. We are connected by an elaborate phone system, with a direct buzz line from their desks to mine—a little something I call the Comedy Alarm. It buzzes often, bringing a panic of perspiration to my temples.

I share my office space with a group of writer’s assistants, all of whom are connected to their superiors by the same buzzing system, all of whom fear their bosses, resent their bosses’ success, and yet crave their bosses’ sweet-ass jobs. When any assistant’s buzzer sounds, everything stops, the buzzee groans, and a feeling of fellow-dread fills the room.

The reception area serves as a hangout for various Columbia secretaries, messengers, and mailroom guys and as a kind of chamber for our constant grievances. The most bitter among us is Kent, who at night performs as the drag queen Jackie Beat, a beat poetess with a vicious tongue. In truth, the line between Kent, the disgruntled office worker, and Jackie Beat, the disgruntled drag queen, is fading daily. Once, early on, feeling momentarily comfortable around the group, I’d mentioned that I’d just moved here and told some brief anecdote about growing up in the D.C. suburbs. When I finished, Kent glowered at me. What makes you think any of us could possibly give a shit about that little story of yours?

It’s just a story, I stammered.

I think you need to think long and hard about what’s a story—and what isn’t, he snipped.

I shut up for two months.

The only thing that keeps the office from sliding into abject misery is the presence of Heidi, an impossibly sweet-natured receptionist who coos at all photos of babies and ponies and who instantly shushes away any negativity by pouting: Noooooo! Don’t even say that! You can bitch about anything to Heidi—I hate my life; I think I have scabies—and the response is always the same, a tender mouse squeal: Noooooo! Don’t even say that!

The assistants around me are all wildly talented people who know they need to suppress any sign of creativity, lest it threaten their bosses or get in the way of answering phone calls. (Years later, Heidi will co-write the music for a Tony-winning Broadway show, Passing Strange. Here at Columbia, she is barely allowed bathroom breaks.)

Across the hall, through the glass door of the reception room, I can see my bosses laughing hysterically in their office. They sit facing each other at two massive wooden desks, howling and hooting and idle to all the world, like senators-elect without a mandate. Their desktops are covered with toys—wind-up fruit, plastic swami snakes, a clattering set of dentures. They sit with their feet up, shoes off, reading Variety or leisurely gazing out the window at Gower Street, occasionally winding a toy. And they laugh. They crack each other up. This is what they are each paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do. This is called comedy development.

And it is comic. This is the era of extravagant development deals. Columbia, home to Married…with Children and Who’s the Boss?, is signing up writers left and right—playwrights, performance artists, mildly successful sitcom staffers—to sit around all day and dream up premises for TV series. When the writers come up with what they think is a brilliant concept, they pitch the Columbia development ecutives, and if the ecs like it, the studio pitches the idea to the networks. If the networks bite, the writers become producers of the series, and everyone gets rich.

What, you might ask, have my bosses done to deserve their deal? They worked on a show called The New Leave It to Beaver. Oh, you don’t remember that one? It was a groundbreaking series—for Jerry Mathers. Born on the Disney Channel in 1985 as Still the Beaver. Died on TBS the Year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and eighty-nine. My bosses act as if the Beaver reboot were the modern comedy equivalent of Monty Python, as if everyone in Hollywood were hyper-aware of the brilliant Eddie Haskell subplots they wrote. The way they move through the hallways at Columbia, the way they verily strut into pitch meetings, you can tell they’re still drinking in the mediocre success of The New Leave It to Beaver.

At first, I should confess, I quaffed their Kool-Aid. At my interview, they flat out informed me that they were hilarious, a cut above most clowns. Not like these fucking idiots in Hollywood. I laughed at their audacity. They laughed at my laughing—the whole interview was like a coke party. They told me they would storm Hollywood and, if I went along, I could sort of storm it, too. It sounded like a great idea, and also I was broke.

I suppose I thought they would help me fulfill my dream to become a writer. If nothing else, I would get a comedy apprenticeship and witness the process by which funny ideas become fully baked TV series. Sitting at my desk, I plot out my bright future. They’ll get a sitcom on the air; once it’s in production, I’ll become the writer’s assistant on the show, slay everyone with my jokes, and graduate to staff writer. (Even today, this is The Plan for many aspiring writers looking for their big break. As one writer’s assistant on the hit series Modern Family told me, the job is like the best grad school you could possibly have if you want to be a writer.) I just need to be vigilant, write my own spec scripts on the side, then my bosses will read them and see that I can—

ENHHHHH! The Comedy Alarm. A call from L—. What does he want? I can see him motioning from across the hall to pick up the phone. His irony fills the receiver.

Uh, Jim? I need a ham on rye.

I scramble for a pen. Sure…ham on rye.

And could you make that cold. Very, very cold.

Okay, cold.

And then, uh, one more thing. Could you…sit on that?

Comedy! I hadn’t recognized it when it finally arrived. It is moments like this when I begin to worry that maybe I’ve hitched my wagon to the wrong comedy asses.

I’ll get that sandwich for you is all I say. Then I give him a slight chuckle, because I know that’s what he wants. I have only been here a few months and already I know: My job is to serve them and, more important, to humor them. I am regularly summoned into their office to witness the sparks of their genius, to hear a few bits of schlocky humor that, for the well-being of my job, I had better find uproarious.

By the nepotistic rules of Hollywood, L— was born for this work. The son of a successful screenwriter, blessed with Pacific privilege and an endless supply of chinos, he looks like a California prep with a prankster edge. His hands-in-pockets, coin-jangling energy signals that he has no interest in you unless you’ve written a Cheers episode or might provide him with immediate joke fodder. He speaks loudly, even if he is two feet away from you, to cover the distance he reckons all humans should be kept at. When he talks to his wife on the phone, they speak in Dutch, their secret lingua franca. At first, you think it’s a joke, but it isn’t. (It sounds like: But honey, you can’t mean glrffen roofen rayvma?!? Sklar!)

M—, on the other hand, is schlumpy, with thick curly hair and Coke-bottle glasses that exaggerate every tic and blink. There’s something about him that people feel sympathy for—a loneliness he can’t see—even though he’s mean and may not deserve it. He speaks of having a world of two-hour friends, people he can only stand for 120 minutes: a movie, a dinner, drinks. He’s driven by some animus I imagine to be self-loathing but that, when whipped through the carnival of his ego, miraculously turns into a swaggering confidence. He finishes every joke, every putdown, with an audible nasal grunt, a noise that I suspect is silent to him but that, to the rest of us, sounds like a small cry for therapy.

M— and L— seem mismatched as a comic team. They’re both type A personalities, with no foil, no straight man. Like the worst kind of Funny Guys, they are always, oppressively, on. Every time they see you, they do not merely crack a joke; they molest you with comedy. Their assaults are rapid-fire, cringe-inducing, often offensive. (Nice jacket, Jim. What, did you buy it from a sand nigger in Morocco? Grunt.) Surely, they must think, this is the way to become noticed as a formidable comic force—to launch one’s hilarity from across the room. No one is immune to it. When they walk into a pitch meeting with the Columbia ecs, L— invariably begins the meeting with an antic gag, tripping, Dick Van Dyke-like, over a hassock, or a pair of crossed feet, nearly somersaulting across the room, then rubbing his knees and grimacing in theatrical pain. You can see the same pain flickering in the eyes of the ecs.

The worst is after lunch, when they come into the reception room to get their messages, and all my fellow assistants are there. That’s when they break out in frenetic improv right in front of my desk.

L: Lunch was great! Steak in a…what was it? Saliva sauce?

M: No, I think it was, uh, toe jam.

L: Yeah, toe-jam sauce! Delicious!

M: Oh, and Jim, we forgot to tell you: You’re fired! Heh heh…

Every line is delivered as if I were famished for comedy, as if I’d been waiting all day for their 2:38 performance, live from the reception room. The other assistants are not compelled to laugh—Kent just folds his arms and stares blankly at them—but I am. And I know that as soon as M— and L— exit, the assistants will skewer me for laughing. Kent will turn to me, stone-faced, and say, They’re hilarious. And you’ve got a bright future.

Eventually, I can no longer fake it. When I cannot bring myself to even look at them, to turn my face up and manage a simple Ha, I develop a method of shrugging my shoulders in a fast jerk and gasping inward, as if they had stolen the very laughter from my lungs.

Now, that’s funny! Did everybody hear what I just said? What I just said was funny. What the hell did I just say?

The writer turns to me and gives me his patented What Did I Just Say look. Did you get that down? he says. What’d I say?

It is my job on this TV show to tell people what they just said. It is 1990, and The Plan is going as planned, sort of. I have graduated from development and am now a writer’s assistant on M— and L—’s NBC series, Ferris Bueller. I am the Taker of All Notes, the Keeper of Comedy. I do table, which means I sit at a long conference table with the writers as they try to punch up a script. I jot down what they say, spitting it back to them on demand. It’s a lot like dictation, only funnier.

I tell the writer I didn’t get his joke. I mean, it’s not that I didn’t get it—I’m sure it was great. I just didn’t hear it. There were too many people talking at once.

God damn it, he mutters, slamming a hand on the table. It’s gone…totally lost. He swats his head to indicate its current vacancy, then glares at me as if I were personally responsible for his synapses.

And I am. That’s why I’m here. Anyone can take notes. But it takes a real writer’s assistant to take blame. I am a veritable blame cushion. I am the reason you are not funny this afternoon, and I will be the reason you cannot think of a punch line later tonight. I am the leading cause of amnesia, unfunniness, weak plot points, and all manner of botched jokes.

I can handle the blame. What I cannot handle is the dictation. For one, I do not know shorthand. For another, the dictators are all writers, and every writer is an island unto himself. Each sits there, off in his own world, pitching jokes to the enchanted audience in his mind. All the writers speak at once, trampling over one another’s lines, so that the dialogue all rushes together: And then Ferris says, I like Principal Rooney. He’s a stand-up guy. I just wish he’d fucking sit down.… No no, can’t say fuck. How ’bout Principal Rooney’s not a bad guy once you get past his bad side.… No, no, too soft. How ’bout: Like everyone, there’s two sides to Rooney—the bad side and the evil side.… No, two sides—the nice side and the genocide.… No one’s going to get that.… Haha, I like that.… I’m hungry.…

I try my best to get everything down, scrawling so furiously that my fingers develop pencil polyps, little nubbins of blistered skin I will keep for a decade—my comedy wounds. The work feels Sisyphean, like recording the minutes of Chinese Ping-Pong. It is wearying; it follows me home. I have dreams in which I am Sally on The Dick Van Dyke Show, scribbling down jokes for Morey Amsterdam. I wake up. I am Sally.

BUDDY: Say, that’s pretty funny! What do you say we whip it into a routine?

SALLY: I’ll get my pad!

But Sally had it easy. Here, the writers expect me not only to read back their jokes but to somehow embellish them, to deliver them with feeling and perfect timing. Because if I read back a line and it sounds lame, the writer might accuse me of killing his joke. It happens like this:

WRITERS: [speaking all at once] Blah blah blah and then he says blah blah and then she says blah blah no no because she has car troubles blah blah your mother names her car?

WRITER #1: That’s not what I said! Jesus Christ! I said, My mother’s car is a Lexus. Your mother names her car?

ME: That’s brilliant.

As producers, M— and L— have the final say on which jokes make it into the script. But they have other things to worry about now, and are often mired in conference calls: talking to the suits at the network, getting the network’s notes, fretting about the ratings. When they are busy, they let another producer run the table. I am always delighted by their absence. After all, I am learning a new skill—working the comedy table—which will allow me to escape them, to go off and work on other shows once this one is canceled.

The series, based way too loosely on the classic John Hughes film, stars Charlie Schlatter as Ferris and, in her first major role, a nubile Jennifer Aniston. (To Aniston worshippers, I can offer little dirt. She was lovely, kept to herself on the set, smoldering a bit like her outraged character, 17-year-old Jeannie Bueller. She was a brunette then, with none of Rachel Green’s bob or self-possession. Oh, and there’s this. GQ can exclusively report that everyone on set thought she was hot, including Schlatter, with whom she had a brief, torrid romance—while playing, it must be said, his older sister. To we immaturions on the show, this seemed extra-hot. Like performative incest.)

Problem is, the show is mean. There is none of that winking charm that made the Hughes film a smash. Ferris is too arrogant, the dialogue too fast and sarcastic. The network steps in to try to save the show, demanding we bring in a special guest star. We end up with Buddy Hackett. Ferris is supposed to save the day by getting a big celebrity to give a speech at the school, and he gets…Buddy Hackett? On the set, Hackett refuses to stick to the script and improvises with boozy Borscht Belt vulgarisms. The jokes are filthy, weird, unusable. (Ferrish Buuuewwller, he mewls, I shaw you once. Yeah, lasht time I shaw you I was parachuting into a…sheep field. What?)

We keep having to stay later and later to fix the show. We are often writing or rewriting till two in the morning. We live off take-out food and hard candy. We have no lives. In the wee hours of morning, once the writers have gone, the mice and I hang out as I type up the finished scripts, then send messengers to drop them off at Aniston’s house, Schlatter’s, et al., in time for tomorrow’s shoot or, more likely, reshoot.

Still, though I am busy as the Beav, I am often called away to serve M—. In the middle of a crazed production day, I hear my master calling.

Jim…it’s time for a walk.

My ears prick up, tongue wags, legs Scooby-Doo.

Rearry?

I pad over to M—, virtual leash in mouth. He just holds his house keys in the air, like a Milk-Bone I should jump for.

Anyone who’s ever worked for a horrible boss knows the psychodynamic here. A mean boss is usually an insecure boss, one who needs to see his or her authority reinforced in tangible ways—in acts of submission (walk my dog, bitch!) or in power games that humiliate. When you work for people like that, nothing, you learn, is more important than giving them someone to whom they can feel unquestionably superior.

It’s even worse in Hollywood, world capital of insecurity. Writers, who are anxious creatures anyway, feel they are demeaned by the creative process—by agents who care a lot more about actors (the talent), by development ecs who piss on their work. Having someone writers can personally humiliate fills them with hope and restores their injured sense of justice.

M— seems to need to dish out a lot of humiliation lately. He keeps getting surlier as the show’s ratings slide. He blames the ecs, the studio, the network, and that cunt in comedy development. He turns his rage on his two-hour friends. With a chilling enthusiasm, he winnows his friendships down. I’m taking him off speed dial! he’ll yell out to me, clutching his phone. He’s out of my life! This is a sign for me to take their card off my increasingly bare Rolodex wheel. I stash the card in the desk, in case the friend is revived, Maoist-style.

Dogs and Porsches, he keeps repeating. Remember that: dogs and Porsches. The only things that don’t fuck you!

But even Porsches can fuck you. Often his groggy voice will call me at home early in the morning. Something’s wrong with the 944, he’ll groan. It usually involves a noise he swears he hears in the rear of the car, something sinister and profound. I know what this means. It means (a) there’s probably nothing wrong with the car, and (b) I will be his chauffeur for the day! (Me, I drive a giant ’78 white Chevy Impala, the size of seventy-eight actual impalas, that I bought from the child actor who played Bud on Married…with Children. I realize the purchase was, in part, a passive-aggressive move on my behalf, to have a car your boss would never want to be seen alive in.)

So I jump into my Impala and haul ass, which is kind of like driving a giant couch very slowly, to the Porsche dealership in Westwood to meet him—it’s important I beat him there so he doesn’t suffer the indignity of waiting—as he tries to convince the mechanic there are dark noises coming from the rear of the 944. Half the time, the Porsche people won’t even take the car. There’s nothing wrong with it, they say. You’re just hearing other cars.

It strikes me as the perfect metaphor for his tortured soul, and for the general malaise of L.A. life: We think we’re unhappy but…we’re just hearing other cars.

Ferris Bueller dies an untimely death. NBC kills it after just thirteen episodes. And I am free! Sweet Jesus, I am free.

I inform M— and L— that I am leaving to pursue other interests, such as happiness and being far away from them. (I don’t put it that way.) They seem incredulous that anyone could possibly desert them. I am out of their Rolodex! Forever!

I soon find work as a writer’s assistant on other sitcoms. With nice bosses! Norman Lear: a total mensch. (It was like working for Bad Grandpa, only he was nice and took the whole staff out to fancy dinners.) The one complicating factor: Every show I work on is instantly canceled.

The names read like a short history of American ephemera: Lear’s The Powers That Be, starring Niles from Frasier; the one-episode Hurricane Sam, starring Fran Drescher; the Dudley Moore vehicle Dudley. You will not remember Lear’s 704 Hauser, starring John Amos, in which a black family moves into Archie Bunker’s house, because we made six episodes and they didn’t even bother airing the sixth.

Harsh Hollywood reality: You can labor in TV for years and never work on a series that lasts more than a season: a pilot here, eleven episodes there. But in my five years in the business, I have a miserable track record.

Sometimes you know the show is doomed before it starts. Dudley? Who would name a show Dudley? It’s like they named it so TV critics could snark out on it: Dudley is a dud.… Dudley is deadly. (They did!)

My happiest moments, however, are toward the end of my not-so-brilliant career, when a generous ecutive producer, Susan Beavers, pays me not only a salary but bonuses for jokes. Beavers will go on to produce the long-running hit Two and a Half Men, but our time on deadly Dudley will be short. Still, we give it our best shot. We work late late late into the night, she brings her tiny yappy dogs to the office (what is it with the dogs of L.A.?), and she lets me pitch right along with the writers. I get $20 per joke and $50 per button (a scene-ending joke, which needs a bigger punch line). If I land a joke, she throws a Jackson or a Grant on the table like we’re playing poker. It’s merciful, like something out of Dickens: Saved from penury by wit and a kindly bit of almsgiving.

But here’s the thing: I no longer think I want this. I’ve already decided to leave Hollywood, ever since the night I saw one of my comedy heroes pound his head into the table.

The guy, Ken Estin, was a legendary Emmy-winning writer—a producer on Taxi, cocreator of The Tracey Ullman Show. For some reason this soft-spoken, bearded millionaire has taken a gig producing a truly wretched show, Flesh ’N’ Blood. It’s way past midnight, and the room is exhausted. We need a joke! Actually we need about forty-eight more jokes, better characters, and an interesting premise. Ken, whaddaya got?

There is silence. Ken starts to pound his head, gently, comically, but sincerely, against the tabletop. And then he begins to moan: I should have gotten out a long time ago. It was my wife, really. I was ready to quit the business. I said, You get a million dollars, put it in the bank, and live off the interest. That’s $100,000 a year, if you play it right. Totally reasonable. Get out while you can. But she likes having the Rolls-Royce. She likes the shopping. So here I am. He looks up at us, helpless to explain any of it.

No one says a word. A couple of awkward moments go by, until it’s time to nail the next joke.

Back at the Pet Cemetery, it’s finally time to bury Digger. But M— just won’t leave the Mourning Room. We’re all standing outside next to a cat grave as we, M—’s last remaining friends and his last remaining assistant, wait for the grieving process to end. I look down. Some guy has seven or eight cats buried in one spot. Clearly there’s been some kind of pussy massacre. This place gives me the creeps.

We wait a few minutes, and then from the Mourning Room comes an unholy howl, like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It is tortured and deep and haunted—an animal being baked alive? It takes us a few seconds to realize it is M—, mourning.

It seems to last an eternity, longer than Russian Jews mourn. We hear mumbling and deep, panicked breathing. Finally, Kevin, M—’s best friend, says, One of us better go in, and then looks hopefully at me. Sure, I’ll do it, I say.

I crack the door. The room seems to have darkened dramatically, but the shaft of sunlight illuminates M— kneeling at the coffin. He is babbling incoherently, his fingers running super-affectionately through the clown hair on Digger’s head. The perma-snarl flares back and forth with the motion.

I don’t know what to do. I shuffle over to the coffin. Hey, I say. A couple of us are worried about you. Are you okay?

He stands up, eyes filled with tears, and sobs out a sentence: D-d-d-d-digger…es…es…unfaiiiiir!!!! Then he extends his arms like a baby mummy, like he wants me to pick him up. He’s…reaching out to me. I go with it. I hug the guy. And the strange thing is: It is the deepest, most soul-burning hug of my life. His body feels like a mast collapsing on me, then jittering and jostling wildly in the wind. My legs start to give out. I can hardly hold him up. And then he releases the most primal scream yet—the sound of M— beseeching the lords. He howls over my shoulder for Digger and lost two-hour friends and all that is impermanent. Even now, when I think of my days in L.A., I think of that cry—for a dog’s life, for a thousand dreams chased and lost in Hollywood—and I can barely stand up.

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